Tikorangi Notes: Thursday 12 February, 2015 Wildflowers or weeds?

Pretty by the road to town. The convolvulus IS a problem and agapanthus come in for a lot of criticism in NZ.

Feeling the need to head my site with something more pleasing than the industrialisation of our beloved Tikorangi in my previous post, I flag wildflowers and roadsides. We have been talking about this a great deal over summer and clarifying our thinking. In New Zealand, these are often – in fact usually – seen as weeds for we are still a pastoral countryside where unrelenting green fields are deemed to be the desirable state. And of course our roadside flowers are almost all introduced plants, a few of which run amok.

Who wouldn’t covet the oast houses at Bury Court?

It was interesting watching BBC Gardeners’ World a few days ago. We seem to run about two years behind here so any UK readers may not remember the episode where Carol Klein visited Bury Court and the owner spoke about how he wanted his garden to echo the nature. The nature to which he referred was the hedgerows, meadows and road verges.

We visited Bury Court late last June. Naturally we coveted the lovely oast houses but the garden was also a delight and we learned a great deal from it. We could see the echoes of the English countryside repeated in a managed fashion.

To New Zealanders, nature is more likely to evoke images of our verdant and dense native forests and bush. It is a different perception of the environment altogether and it is taking some thinking to move preconceptions away from weeds to valued wildflowers that contribute to the eco system. Of course the pasture grass that we value so highly for our grass-fed stock is no more native than the wildflowers that grace our verges but the latter still get a bad rap here. I will return to this topic.

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What determines whether a plant is a hated weed for me is not whether it runs amok or even whether it is exotic or native, but whether you can remove it when desired. Agapanthus is so difficult to kill – I hate it with a passion. (Of course it doesn’t help that it seems to line every third or fourth driveway.) Cabbage trees are also very difficult to kill, as I have discovered. I’m starting to hate them too! And the bracken fern over the fence is starting to become a problem. Daisies and buttercups are fine by me.